(Posted February 12, 2010)
As mentioned in the paper (also
posted on this website) titled
‘Shrink’
or ‘Expander,' the field of
psychotherapy has emerged and gone through at least two phases: In the
first phase, the model of dis-ease and healing involved opening to the
powers of the unconscious mind. Such practitioners imagined themselves
as expanding the options available to people through the power of
truth, of knowing the issues involved in the pitfalls and temptations
of self-deception.
However, as fields develop, it is common that earlier theories and sets
of assumptions come to be thought of as being too limited. To the
extent that some professionals sought to explain their patients’
problems according to these early theories, the slang term “shrink”
functioned not only to reduce the status gradient and degree of
vulnerability of patients in the mid-late 20th century, but also to
express how the “old-fashioned” therapists’ work appeared in the eyes
of the next generation, which was more integrative, eclectic, and open
to the human potential.
Yet, ironically, even this generation of psychotherapists with their
wider range of ideas about what made people “sick” and what could be
done to help them might be viewed as still restricted by their role and
world-view, might still be thought of as slightly shrink-like, because
many of the actual factors in psycho-social dis-ease require diagnosis
and remediation at the level of the culture, the body politic, the
overall social system of norms and expectations. Such a challenge is
vastly more difficult, and no single person can do all that much. (The
line, “It takes a village to raise a child” may illustrate this
problem.)
The key is the word “hygiene,” which means preventive medicine,
activities the individual, family, or the whole society can do to
prevent disease before it even happens. (There are other gradients of
prevention, too: Early and prompt treatment can prevent complications;
and adequate treatment of complications can prevent even more
problematic secondary and tertiary complications. So, for example,
early stroke treatment with physical therapy can often reduce long-term
disability.)
Still, it seems valid for me to at least begin the process by
attempting to name the issues, to identify and clarify the nature of
the problems involved. The key is to recognize that cultural factors
can affect mental hygiene as much as public health measures (which
often involve fundamental political activities) may be necessary to
affect physical hygiene. The following themes are among those that I
imagine will become recognized as being factors in psycho-social
distress and dysfunction:
Ignorance and Education
I’ve been impressed in my over forty years in clinical practice and
teaching that most people lack what I consider to be fairly basic
information about the nature of the mind and relationships. I think
these ideas should be taught in the mainstream curriculum, especially
in the middle and later years—from middle school through college. I
think that many problems arise because folks have just never heard
certain themes being talked about, discussed, clarified, informed. I
consider this a kind of “psychological illiteracy.”
About a century ago, in the shift from a more rural and agrarian
culture to a more urban and industrial society, learning how to read
and write—acquiring literacy—became increasingly necessary for economic
success. I think that today knowing how to develop the skills of
self-awareness, communications, and interpersonal problem-solving are
becoming as necessary for adaptation in a postmodern world as learning
to read, write, and do arithmetic was a century past. I call these
types of skills “psychological literacy.”
While some of this may be learned in therapy, I believe most should
have been learned in school as a matter of public policy. It involves
the way we (collectively) run public and private schools, and progress
in this direction needs to recognize the prevalence of barriers of
prejudice towards psychology!
It’s not just a matter of learning information. Skills need to be
developed, practiced, and this also entails a shift from mere
instruction to experiential practice. For example, I envision young
people role playing situations that involve the exercise of tact,
diplomacy, good manners, and more subtle communications skills.
It still is widely assumed that ordinary adults were adequately
self-aware, but this is not so. Psychological literacy doesn’t come
naturally with age, but needs to be learned specifically—again like
reading and writing. As another analogy, for much of history it used to
be thought that the average diet that didn’t starve one was therefore
adequate—but that was before research had been done on vitamins,
essential minerals, and other subtle nutrients. Again, these are
matters that involve not only education, but the general public that
would support such policies, as expressed in the political and economic
arenas.
Economic Injustice
Dare we propose that there could be a middle ground between the folly
of
state communism and exploitative capitalism? I think we need to
recognize that political and economic systems that leave large numbers
of people unnecessarily disadvantaged and poor tend to create a variety
of consequences in terms of morale, the strength of the family or
parental responsibility, peer group values, and so forth. It’s clear
these contribute to higher degrees of social pathology, crime,
cheating, addiction, and so forth, which in turn generate occasions of
trauma and a far more pervasive incidence of post-traumatic reactions
among victims and their families than might otherwise occur.
Not All Problems Can Be Solved Through Social Action
At this point, I think it’s necessary to note that of course there are
many psychosocial problems that will inevitably arise as part of
the human condition. I think that people tend to retain childish
attitudes and personal maneuvers, and these will need to be worked out
as part of maturation. (See
paper on the
primal illusions.) Some anxiety, depression, and other symptoms
accompany the mere process of adjusting to the realities of life. This
happens even if parents are perfect in their role performance in every
way. Given that, the goal of mental hygiene is not perfection, any more
than the goal of physical hygiene would prevent every possible
infection. (Indeed, a certain amount of infections of different kinds
may actually strengthen the immune system and be necessary for optimal
health, and, similarly, a certain amount of stress and distress may be
optimal for helping people to learn to be optimally resilient.)
Nevertheless, I am sure that there are also a great many sources of
unnecessary stress, trauma, and folly, and I think that addressing
these challenges to mental health also belongs in a realistic review of
what might be the actual causes of psychiatric symptoms and socially
destructive patterns.
Identifying Forms of Oppression
I define oppression as a situation in which the negative impacts are
denied by certain key people, or the whole problem is ignored. The key
is the mixture of denial and mere unconsciousness: Many people grew up
in that value system and it has never occurred to them that it should
or even could be different.
An oppressive system evolves into a controversy when a certain critical
mass of critical people have been able to voice their criticism so that
many if not most others at least have heard of their objections. Then
there may be a period of years or decades (or centuries) where that new
or alternative idea gradually gains enough reputability so that new
norms become established.
Someone once said that a new idea is at first received with
incredulity—those questioning the system must be mad or very wicked—;
then contempt—those questioning the system are wrong-headed, merely
childishly rebellious, or in other ways demonized. Finally, the idea
that, say, women should vote or slavery is a bad thing becomes a norm.
What happens with each breakthrough, though, is that most people revert
to feeling that now that this wrong has been righted, everything else
is okay. The scarey truth is that there are many other oppressions that
remain taboo and unconscious.
So, beyond psychotherapy, a higher consciousness approach includes
addressing number 5, extending the list started in the previous
section, working to clarify and justly ameliorate all potentially
oppressive situations!
Subtle Oppressions
Once the idea of oppression is absorbed, along with the idea that there
may be widespread social practices and attitudes that only benefit the
more privileged—and sometimes even then not that much—, then one begins
to wonder about our society:
A. Appearance, the need to fit a rather narrow range
of the sense of being attractive, involving hair, cosmetics, body
build, clothes, fashionable accessories, tatoos, etc., leads to all
sorts of syndromes that are not infrequently carried to
excess—sometimes by the most high-striving of society (e.g., anorexia
in dancers and models; plastic surgery in aspiring actors or media
celebrities). Books are being written about this, but incredible
amounts of money are being spent, and energies expended, and
psychological distress experienced, for those for whom the ideal
doesn’t come easy.
B. The theme of uncomfortable clothing is worth
mentioning, for men as well as women—clothes that are insufficient for
when it’s cold, or too stuffy when it’s hot, too tight or bulky, that
interfere with using the toilet, too sexy when one might not want to be
seen in that role, and so forth.
C. I think the dominance of the realm of imagination
by the media and toy manufacturers, like competition, goes too far.
There needs to be more time and activities that allow kids and adults
to cultivate their own inner potential for imagining, rather than
having the images packaged and delivered to them. I call this
“imaginative oppression.”
D. In the same sense, the commercial
availability of games, social media, and distractions has made it
difficult to discover the rewards of some degrees of solitude, which
then confer some degrees of a sense of self-sufficiency. (I’m really
talking about letting there be some balance in systems that may have
become unbalanced.)
Need for a Realistic Philosophy of Life
Philosophy for a few centuries became the domains of religion, where it
operated within a context of certain given assumptions; or the domain
of academic philosophy, where professors and graduate students
attempted to address the broadest problems in the most thorough
fashions, which made the subject too dry, way too thick, and irrelevant
to the general population. Of course there were implicit philosophies
of life as played out in the major institutions and general culture,
but few people were aware that they were using, struggling with, or
disagreeing with the core issues involved.
I think that many people today who suffer even a little from the more
common psychological symptoms are often stressed also by a confusing,
misleading, excessively and un-necessarily guilt- or shame-producing,
or inadequate philosophy or set of beliefs about what life is about.
Their sense of meaning and what their purpose should be is
correspondingly confused, watered-down, or even lacking. My impression
is that this is pervasive, but if life is not particularly stressful,
for many they go on, not for the moment needing the consolations of a
more resilient philosophy.
For those under stress, though, the lack of such a philosophy can make
a big difference in how well and with what effectiveness they can
marshal their other psycho-social resources. (In medicine, to show an
analogy, there is evidence that certain kinds of nutritional
deficiencies can weaken the immune system’s effectiveness. So although
it is the immune system that is the first level of defense, the overall
nutritional status in turn affects the immune system. Similarly, the
effectiveness of the cultural morale may affect personal psychosocial
resilience.)
Work on generating a more effective popular philosophy may be a
realistic goal for those thinking about mental hygiene in the broadest
terms. (Again, from that standpoint, even the most broad-minded, most
modern and eclectic psychotherapists are, relativistically speaking,
“shrinks.”
Spirituality
For many people, a philosophy of life, their spirituality, and their
religion are not significantly different, so the point to be made here
is a further extension of the idea of addressing the transpersonal or
spiritual dimensions in psychotherapy—but applying this beyond the
therapeutic context.
I define spirituality as the activity—not a state of being, but an
activity, a doing—the activity of developing a relationship with and/or
deepening one’s sense of connectedness to the Greater Wholeness of
Being. This Greater Wholeness may be symbolically personified as God or
one of the other names for Divinity, or it may be non-personal, a set
of cosmic and moral ideals or principles. The associated belief is
secondary. People can be spiritual without adhering to this or that
belief system.
The key, though, is that this greater relationship works to offer some
sense of significance withing a grander system. Human life is not just
getting by and getting what you can in the process. Nor is it just
about the individual. A psychotherapist who represents a psychology
that over-emphasizes individuality is almost by definition a shrink.
Certainly I am, and promoting some degree of individuality is useful;
but also we are, and a psychology and philosophy that doesn’t take that
wider dimension into account is inadequate.
It used to be that this job was delegated to the minister. People were
assumed to be affiliated with a religion that satisfied their
existential questions. This turns out to be so wrong. Some people
(perhaps most?) who are religious—in that they feel affiliated with an
institution that tries to organize the spiritual impulse—have no idea
how to go about becoming more spiritual, how to deepen or develop their
connectedness. For them, mere membership suffices. And for some,
certain religions don’t work insofar as truly helping them to find the
solace and meaning that they hope to achieve.
The idea that religion and a full psychology can be separated is
quickly becoming as untenable as the idea that body and mind, or mind
and society can continue to be adequately thought about in separate
compartments. Our present era is deeply inter-disciplinary, even if
many of the practitioners of different disciplines, specialities,
departments, and so on haven’t caught on yet.
Reducing Fear-Based Motivations
One of the more pervasive patterns in our culture has been its reliance
on fear-based motivation. This takes a variety of forms, and the point
here is that unless the culture as a whole rises up to challenge these
types of oppression, they will continue to generate psychological
distress.
A. Competition. A certain amount of this is
inevitable. Like intoxication or the seeking of distraction, this is
part of the human condition, and we won’t be able to get “rid” of these
components—nor, like all infections—should we. Some of these things
might be good. The problem involves how much and too much. I think at
present our culture doesn’t offer enough balancing respect to a host of
non-competitive activities, games, art forms, modes of expression, and
the like. We need both elements, with, I think, a slight weighting
towards the non-competitive.
B. A corollary of the above involves the generation
of more participatory activities that allow for mediocre talent, more
types of dancing, singing, drama, and other activities that don’t
require one to be “the best.” There is a place for those who are so
excellent they can charge for people to watch or hear their
performance, but these cultural forms need not dominate our culture as
much as they do.
C. The point is that in a culture overly weighted to
competitiveness, being less than the “best” becomes a source of
humiliation and defeat, and this, I think, is a subtle form of
oppression.
D. I think the concept of hell is another widely
held and surprisingly toxic belief. Many people can grow up and brush
these stories aside, but many others who are a little more credulous or
sensitive are deeply affected and bothered by such myths and it really
poisons their psyches, sets up a kind of chronic, low-grade
post-traumatic-stress-disorder-like syndrome. I think it’s time that
physicians dared comment on this widespread practice. It’s as bad in my
mind as female genital mutilation with germ-contaminated knives. That
religious belief should be held to a standard beyond the concerns of
health and hygiene is a common and too-often unquestioned assumption.
E. Test-oriented education can also generate
significant levels of stress in many kids. Some just drop out, while
others suffer: The emphasis on the need to memorize dry facts with
little time to warm up to their relevance is, I think, at present a
predominant norm. It feeds the needs of education administrators to
demonstrate the effectiveness of their role; one can easily test for
the acquisition of information. But it messes people up during
childhood and later, offers the misleading illusion that knowing facts
is really a proof of intelligence, and that it offers protection from
the actual challenges of life—92% of which do not involve the
remembering of facts!
That major life challenges in work and learning can be met through
luring people, encouraging them, and eliminating the fear factor—this
new paradigm idea doesn’t seem to have entered the cultural mainstream,
even though it is a common element in advanced management skills
seminars.
Daring to Think Creatively
This is another extension of the aforementioned theme of promoting
creativity as a core dynamic of psychotherapy. We must remember that
not long ago for most people creative thinking itself was discouraged.
Questioning was seen as impudence, and authority felt entitled to not
having to justify its power. Schooling was an exercise in mindless
obedience and the act of creativity was often confused with rebellion
for the sake of wickedness itself. This was certainly in keeping with
the dominant forces of religion, politics, and economics in the culture.
People who had developed a slave mentality, becoming accustomed to the
constraints of the oppressive culture, joined with the authorities in
hating the free-thinker, the heretic, the rebel. He was a threat to law
and order, to the social fabric. He deserved to die by torture—and this
punishment was enforced with relish. There was of course an element of
jealousy: How come he gets to dare to be free when I have to
participate in the enslavement of myself, mentally? If I have to become
mindlessly obedient and feel virtuous in doing so, I’ll be damned
(almost literally) if I am going to tolerate that person’s exercise of
freedom. Of course I rationalize this by thinking of all the ways that
creative person isn’t just creative, but wicked and dangerous.
Now, alas, we live in an era in which culture change has speeded up,
and a capacity for flexibility and innovation makes one more adaptive,
more valuable to employers. Our schools claim they support creativity,
but in fact they do the opposite—only perhaps a little less
repressively than in some other countries. Psychotherapy and other
cultural activities need to participate in the cultivation and
liberation of imagination, spontaneity, and creativity, and an adequate
psychology needs to recognize the need for this—to be an expander,
then, rather than a shrink.
Supporting Improvisation
This is an extension of the above idea. Moreno realized that most
creative breakthroughs come from experimenting. Occasionally some come
through flashes of inspiration, but even these were preceded by
exploratory work, getting down and messing with the question. It
requires a freedom to explore.
Encouraging the Spirit of Play
I think the essence of play involves a mixture of the spirit of
exploration and the spirit of feeling relatively safe—especially in the
social matrix. (Kids and grown-ups can tolerate more danger in some of
their sports and still experience the activity as play.)
Play is a related concept. How can our culture offer more safe contexts
so that people can be free to improvise, try things out, make mistakes
with no significant consequences. The “play” of many organized sports
at all age levels has become serious enough that a mistake is likely to
engender significant feelings of humiliation in the eyes of others,
shame, guilt, and other negative feelings, such as anger at others’
mistakes or disagreeing with a referee’s call.
And freedom for imaginative and expressive play is another realm—there
are pervasive residual social norms that cannot differentiate
spontaneity and imaginativeness with silliness or craziness—something
to be avoided. I have been trying to advocate for a challenging of that
blind and shallow prejudice.
Indeed, a subtle form of age-ism involves the attribution to childhood
of many qualities we actually might benefit from in middle and later
adulthood—imagination, playfulness, spontaneity, enthusiasm,
expressiveness, and so forth. I call these not “young-at-heart,” but
vitality. There’s nothing essentially “young” about them except for the
fact that their precursors begin in childhood. The oppression involves
the discomfort of teens in trying to act “grown up” and suppressing
these qualities as too “baby-ish”—it’s an immature kind of
over-shooting the mark.
Having Fun
Fun, like creativity, has been traditionally suppressed, because it
seemed to interfere with work and submissive worship. Playfulness,
though, is as much a part of human nature as sex. It represents the
capacity to mix varying amounts of exploratory and experimental
behavior with varying amounts of setting up contexts wherein those
experiments are relatively fail-safe. Exploratory behavior almost by
definition will grope, under-shoot and over-shoot the mark, and thereby
make mistakes. Those mistakes symbolize a bit of breakthrough insight
that for all our cleverness, we are vulnerable and foolish. In small
doses, this tension between us-as-smart and us-as-fool is funny. The
tension is relieved by the setting being safe, the mistakes being of
little or no consequence, and this leads to laughter and a sense of
thrill and fun.
This goes on at all ages with all tasks, and being able to set up tasks
with this spirit, makes it a game, makes it playful. As the character
of Mary Poppins sings is the prelude to the song, “A Spoonful of Sugar
(Makes the Medicine Go Down)” in the classic 1950s Disney movie:
In every job that must be done there is an element
of fun.
You find the fun and snap!, the job’s a game!
Most psychologies of the mid-20th century ignored the place of play in
life, which was sort of the way that medicine, lacking the tools to
appreciate it, hardly knew how to appreciate the prevalent influence of
immunology in physiology until again the mid-late 20th century!
An expander as a therapist recognizes that to learn something that
requires a degree of confrontation with the recognition that one may
have been thinking in a mistaken fashion—a somewhat shame-producing
operation—it is necessary to frame the larger therapy as a more
pleasant and supportive experience, at a ratio of perhaps 70% fun to
30% work.
One way to make therapy more fun is to help the patient feel that s/he
is learning a skill, or a group of skills, much like one learns to swim
and shoot a bow and arrow and other things at camp. And learning at
camp, if its done right, can be made to be more like play.
Expressiveness in Life
I mentioned
in the other paper that
another way to move from shrink to expander is to recognize that life
involves far more than talk, insight, catharsis or
tears. There is also the triumph of symbolically weaving sorrow or
grief into a song or dance, representing one’s present re-birth as a
sculpture, reflecting on foolishness and nascent wisdom in poetry, or
participating in improvisational or even scripted drama. Ritual can
partake of all of these elements and more, and further intensify and
deepen consciously chosen activities of meaning-making. But this
applies also to the challenge of realizing that the arts are being
presently squeezed out of the curriculum, with perhaps some exception
for programs that rest on competition. While developing excellence in
artistic pursuit has merit, we need to recognize also that helping
ordinary people exercise their ordinary levels of talent---sometimes
mediocre or less impressive levels of skill---still does much to
enlarge the personality. The point is to help people expand into their
potential. I think we need to re-value and expand activities that have
to do with not only vocational guidance, but also avocational guidance!
Beyond the creative arts, there is also self-discovery as well as
self-expression in finding one’s talents in sports, physical
activities, games, various types of recreation, occupation, home life,
and every other human activity. This is an activity that celebrates the
diversity of forms of growth and development. Mere insight and verbal
formulations at best only ready someone to re-create their own lives in
these various channels with more consciousness, but traditional
therapy is itself only a foundation: A broader vision of therapy
includes the wider patterns of growth, a fuller perspective on what
education, celebration, expression, contemplation, loving and bringing
others forth, too, belonging, and other activities are about.
Recognizing Addictions
Over the last century we have come to be more alert to an increasing
variety of not only obvious addictions (e.g., alcohol or drug abuse)
but also addiction-like patterns in which people come to overly rely on
some illusory source of relief for their life challenges. This idea has
only begun to penetrate the mainstream consciousness: Television and
other media can become sort-of addictive, as can shopping, gambling,
seeking sexual affairs, pornography, spending too much, maintaining
one’s ideal appearance, following the news, or becoming otherwise
overly obsessed with any source of distraction.
The trouble is that many of these quasi-addictions are all right and
perhaps even beneficial when enjoyed in moderation—but there is too
little general awareness and discussion of the pitfalls of overuse.
Consciousness-raising is also needed for this problem.In the mid-20th
century few psychologies had much of a handle
(theoretically) on addictions, or if they did, they were something like
this: If you had good insight, had worked through your complexes, then
addictive substances or activities would have no hold on you. It was
not so.
One of the more important developments in the later 20th
century was the heightened recognition of the seductive power of
certain addictive substances—no matter how seemingly healthy the person
had been before their seduction. Several corresponding developments
also happened: Family members were seduced into collaborating,
colluding, “enabling,” because “If you loved me you’d love what I
love.” Another development was the recognition that there could be many
types of addiction just as destructive though not related to actual
physiology—i.e, if not the somatic dynamics, then the psychosocial
dynamics were almost the same: One could be virtually addicted to the
pursuit of sex, gambling, shopping, food, gambling, over-spending,
video games, television, and many other things. There are now self-help
take-offs of A.A. for a surprising variety of activities. Part of being
an expander includes noting the need to build awareness of and a
socio-individual psychology that recognizes the social and culture
pervasiveness of seductions into addictive-like behavior.
But how then to get “high” or have fun without getting drunk or
satisfying the self symbolically through the addiction? An
expander-therapy would also address the need to develop a repertoire of
wholesome non-addicting forms of recreation, stuff that’s fun but also
healthy. There are increasing opportunities for this, but in general,
it’s not easy to find them in a culture that over-emphasizes
competition and the use of the arts for performance for passive
audiences rather than participation.
Another thing to avoid is too much vicarious experience,
pseudo-experience that can give the illusion of “being alive” without
any substantial involvement of self. There is such a thing as an excess
of television, spectator sports and programs, and the like, and a
relative lack of actual involvement in doing, experiencing, and
developing.
Self-Management
Therapy in general helps build the implicit skilfulness of the patient
in self-management. I think it would be a more expanding process by far
if this could be made explicit: Patients should re-frame their role
from slightly passive, the recipient of the ministrations of the
mysterious doctor-doing-stuff, to a different role: The therapist
becomes an educator-coach who will at times demonstrate and at times
explicitly teach how to manage the many components of therapy—and most
of those in turn can be re-framed as adjustments to the skill-set.
Part of this also entails the shift of identity of the client from one
who slips from bare management into identification with this or that
role, to an identity with the self as the inner manager, one who takes
stock of the various roles to be played, notes how they are being
played, considers what changes are needed, analyzes the points of
problem, encourages the rest, addresses the problem as mediator,
negotiator, considers all the inner voices, makes decisions, finds
healthier outlets for less worthy motivations, and so forth. The self
then becomes an artist, redefining, recreating his or her own life. The
therapist’s maneuvers, as an expander, supports this shift in primary
identity.
Another part of this involves the overall development of skills of
critical thinking, more rationality, more sensitivity to the seductions
of irrational thinking—this is part of what is known as cognitive
therapy—and it adds to the overall enterprise of moving from barely
adequate self-manager to excellent self-manager—worthy, indeed of
promotion to chief executive ego.
Healthy Living
The needs of the body cannot be ignored. As public discourse is moving
towards considering a national health care insurance program, issues
related to a more conscious level of self-care are heightened. Diet,
smoking, drinking, carelessness in driving, certain risky behaviors
sexually and in sports, and so forth all are being noted with more
focus, because folly in these areas may end up costing everyone far
more money. Consciousness-raising in therapy is but a tiny part of this
challenge---it needs to come into the public sector. Hippocrates, the
legendary Father of Medicine, back in Ancient Greece,
noted that a healthy mind resides in a healthy body. Thus, attention to
exercise, avoidance of unhealthy habits, good diet, adequate sleep,
stress-reduction and relaxation, and even such activities as regular
flossing of the teeth all result in feeling better, having less pain,
and having more energy available to really live.
Faith-ing
In the past, therapists and the society as a whole tended to relegate
questions about religion to the province of ministers. This includes
struggles with identity, meaning, belongingness, purpose, and the like.
The trouble is
that while a small number have experience as chaplains who can work
with people beyond their own faith tradition, most don't have such
skills. Also, there are increasing numbers of people who (1) don't have
any affiliation with a particular religion or denomination; and (2)
really want to deal with their issues either in therapy or in
non-therapy settings where there is no pressure for them to end up in
any particular camp.
The key here is to disconnect the idea that teachers have to get
students to believe the way they do, or even that there is a single
objective truth that is right and all others are wrong. The paradigm
shift needs to be towards a recognition that people construct their own
meaning systems out of scores of sources, many of them involving the
indvidual's personal network of people, book, and experiences. The
point is to get more clear on finding some at least provisional ideas
that one can then say, "this works for me." This philosophy of life can
then be developed in time.
A related idea has to do with the emergence of a trend in psychology
called “positive psychology.” This approach redeems the ethos of
positive thinking that preceded Freudianism (and also enjoyed a
resurgence in the work of Norman Vincent Peale and others in
mid-century); yet does not depend on mere repression for its
effectiveness. Another way to say this is that it isn’t enough to just
correct weaknesses; it’s
important to build up compensatory strengths. The habits of optimism
and cheerfulness are not just results of feeling good—doing these even
if you don’t feel good help you to feel good! This was viewed by
mid-20th century psychology (incorrectly) as superficial. In truth, if
there is no work on clearing up the knots in the psyche, then mere
positivity won’t suffice; however, if there is only clearing up the
knots and no positivity, there isn’t an adequate pay-off to reinforce
whatever gains are made. Both approaches are needed—and the others also
mentioned above. Practicing optimism is by no means an avoidance of the
dark side of human nature, but dwelling only on the dark side is a
limited perspective.
Other forms of “expansion” include imagination development, which
complements all of the other themes. Together, they lead to another
category that shrinks don’t have, as far as I can tell—a vision of what
more-than-mere-normalcy entails: I’m speaking of flourishing, a kind of
psychological vitality; and “deep maturity,” a more expanded view of
what life is about.
Ways of Expansion
To begin with, we need a psychological theory that takes into account
the idea that humans do expand and moreover seek expansion as a primary
motivation. Kids explore everything they can. When they learn words,
they start to make up funny words, pig latin, double talk, play with
nonsense, codes, start to explore the boundaries of whatever “rules”
they’re taught. They do this with games, with climbing. “Be careful” is
one of the silliest things to say, because for them the game is to take
it to the limit and not get hurt—how far can they try this or that on
their bicycles or skateboards or in climbing and not fall down?
People explore every nook and cranny that can be explored. The problem
with any theory is that there are some folks out there right now going
beyond the boundaries of that theory. So we need a theory that takes
this stretching and transcending and transgressing and exploring into
account, a theory that recognizes the creativity inherent in the human
potential.
Sure, sometimes kids fall down on their skateboards and get a broken
bone. And sure, some theories and chemistry experiments blow up into
your face and maybe blow up the whole building. Creativity is a
dangerous business, it is sometimes brilliant and opens breakthroughs
and sometimes so wrong and wicked and stupid that it causes great harm.
As one of my favorite philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
pointed out, “It is the business of the future to be dangerous.”
Theories that seek safety tend also to suppress innovation, they tend
to stay with what has worked in the past, or at least has seemed to
work. The trouble is, a sharp mind will notice that whatever has been
invented just might be improved. This is offensive to the mind that
confuses the comfort of a routine, complacency and temporary
contentment for oneself, with ultimate truth. So here is again
part of the larger tension of generating theories that dare to look
beyond their own ability to look beyond.
So, first, a theory that recognizes the exploratory nature of the mind,
into channels that include music, mathematics, philosophy, depth
psychology, transpersonal psychology, spirituality, art, humor, and so
forth. Nor are these to be taken as “just” expressions of or extensions
of “primary” or “basic” instincts. That kind of talk is reductionistic
“shrink”-like and unhelpful. We need to recognize these extensions of
our mind and body into new possibilities to be essential to human
nature.
One of the gifts of existentialism as a philosophy is that it was a
counter to essentialism: In the 19th century there was a proliferation
of heavy philosophy that, like psychoanalysis, had many good ideas, but
also tended to presume too much to define human nature, and thereby put
a limit of sorts on how we thought about our potential. It, too, was a
bit “shrink-ish.” The phrase, “existence precedes essence,” means that
whatever one might think they know about what human nature is about,
the living of life can be more true, more complex, and at times extend
beyond what any formulation might suggest. Life itself transcends
words, and this is illustrated by poets admitting that their intuitions
and experiences of love or beauty or the Holy transcends their capacity
to capture those experiences in their work.
Beyond Therapy
Finally, the idea that therapy is the change agent should be revised:
Instead, perhaps we should think of our professional work more as
initiation than as treatment. I envision this work as the teaching of
skills so that people can continue to pursue their process of
self-development with close friends and family (who share the ethos of
psychological reflection and self-improvement), uplifting groups in
spiritual communities, occasional personal growth workshops or classes,
and the like. It’s a life-time activity and once a degree of stability
is re-established, ongoing personal maturation need not be pursued
within the frankly costly context of one-to-one or group therapy. I
believe in the old Chinese saying, “If you give a man a fish, you feed
him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for the rest of
his life.”
Summary
I’m not saying that the aforementioned factors are “the real
causes” of mental illness, but I am quite convinced that they add a
little or a lot to the burden of causative factors, depending on the
case; and, equally, unless these things become more widely recognized
as issues to be addressed as matters of public policy, educational
curriculum, and popular discourse, their negative effects will continue
to be a not-insignificant factor in the general challenge of mental
hygiene in a postmodern era.
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